Hasta La Gadget!

Turn the lights off, crank up your Music for Airports LP, and clear your appointments for the rest of the afternoon — it’s time to get your relaxation on with Flottille, tiny paper snowflakes that unfold as they’re exposed to water. French artist Étienne Cliquet uses a computer to design the machine-cut pieces, folds them by hand, and then gingerly dips them into the water with a pair of tweezers. The shapes expand slowly and hypnotically, likely the result of absorption through capillary action — not quite self-folding origami, but it’ll do in a pinch. Cliquet hopes they’ll shine some light on the “disturbing potential of micro and nanotechnology.” Fine, but what about the disturbing potential of origami-based technology?

Flottille unfolding origami is anti-nanotechnology, pro-chilaxing (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 May 2011 18:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Another day, another step closer to quantum dot reality. Today, Nanosys unveiled its new Quantum Dot Enhancement Film (QDEF), marking the first time that the nanotechnology is available for LCD manufacturers. According to the company, its optical film can deliver up to 60 percent of all colors visible to the human eye, compared with the 20 to 25 percent that most displays offer. To create QDEF, Nanosys’ engineers suspended a blend of quantum dots within optical film and applied it to a blue LED, which helped get the nanocrystals excited. Once they started hopping around, the dots emitted high-quality white light and a rich, wide color gamut, without consuming as much power as white LED-based materials. No word yet on when we can expect to see QDEF in consumer displays, but Nanosys claims that the film is “process-ready” and easy for manufacturers to integrate. For now, you can amuse yourselves by comparing the two frogs pictured above and guessing which one is covered in quantum dots. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading Nanosys unveils Quantum Dot Enhancement Film for LCDs, promises all kinds of colors

Nanosys unveils Quantum Dot Enhancement Film for LCDs, promises all kinds of colors originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 May 2011 13:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Building a franken-brain has long been a holy grail of sorts for scientists, but now a team of engineering researchers have made what they claim to be a significant breakthrough towards that goal. Alice Parker and Chongwu Zhou of USC used carbon nanotubes to create synthetic synapse circuits that mimic neurons, the basic building blocks of the brain. This could be invaluable to AI research, though the team still hasn’t tackled the problem of scope — our brains are home to 100 billion neurons, each of which has 10,000 synapses. Moreover, these nanotubes are critically lacking in plasticity — they can’t form new connections, produce new neurons, or adapt with age. All told, the scientists say, we’re decades away from having fake brains — or even sections of it — but if the technology advances as they hope it will, people might one day be able to recover from devastating brain injuries and drive cars smart enough to avert deadly accidents.

Continue reading Researchers build synthetic synapse circuit, prosthetic brains still decades away

Researchers build synthetic synapse circuit, prosthetic brains still decades away originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Apr 2011 19:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Piezoelectric nanowires are the stuff that make power-generating pants a possibility, and that prodigious potential has drawn the attention of NASA. You see, self-powered spacesuits are awfully attractive to our nation’s space agency, and a few of its finest student researchers have discovered that the current-creating strands of zinc oxide can be made longer and straighter — and therefore more powerful — when freed from gravity’s unrelenting pull. That means nanowires grown in microgravity could lead to higher capacity batteries and the aforementioned juice-generating interstellar garb. Of course, there’s no such end-products yet, but let’s see if NASA can do what others have not: give pants-power to the people.

NASA makes longer, straighter piezoelectric nanowires in microgravity, no flat iron needed originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Apr 2011 01:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Cancer’s not slowing its march to ruining as many lives as it possibly can, so it’s always pleasing to hear of any new developments that act as hurdles. The latest in the world of disease-prevention comes from Harvard University, where researches have created a dime-sized carbon nanotube forest (read: lots of nanotubes, like those shown above) that can be used to trap cancer cells when blood passes through. A few years back, Mehmet Toner, a biomedical engineering professor at Harvard, created a device similar to the nano-forest that was less effective because silicon was used instead of carbon tubes. Today, Toner has teamed up with Brian Wardle, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, who together have redesigned the original microfluid device to work eight times more efficiently than its predecessor. The carbon nanotubes make diagnosis a fair bit simpler, largely because of the antibodies attached to them that help trap cancer cells as they pass through — something that’s being tailored to work with HIV as well. Things are starting to look moderately promising for cancer-stricken individuals, as hospitals have already began using the original device to detect malignant cells and ultimately prevent them from spreading — here’s hoping it’s qualified for mass adoption sooner rather than later.

Carbon nanotubes used to more easily detect cancer cells, HIV originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 Mar 2011 01:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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